A particular reason I love this story is that not only it went very well, but it wasn’t by accident. Nate prepared very carefully for it, thinking it through and taking his time to plan it — without either rushing or procrastinating.

Another reason this story is of particular interest to me is that Nate didn’t have to step down, as he explains in the episode. He built a business he’s proud of — profitable, growing, stable, with a solid PMF — but also recognised that for a number of reasons he didn’t want to lead it going forward. It’s wonderful to witness someone operating with this level of self-awareness.

If you’re contemplating your own CEO transition, check out his story. It’s both inspiration and a roadmap. Enjoy the episode!

I struggle to make sense of things. It’s not that I’m overwhelmed or numb, but my intuition is telling me that reading more about what’s going on day-to-day isn’t helping me make sense of where the world is. I can give all kinds of explanations, point at Ray Dalio’s analysis and other good works, of course, but that’s not enough: we’re likely at a cusp of some state transition we’ll only understand in retrospect.

My current model of the world is inadequate, but the most it can do is to point at its failings. Yes, it feels like February 2020 if we use the Covid analogy, or 1988 if we use the USSR collapse analogy, but so what? What could have helped people at those moments of history truly grasp what they were about to experience?

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I keep using AI because of its leverage, but it’s painfully clear that learning how to use Claude Code or whatever isn’t enough. It’s table stakes. Not knowing how to use AI is like not knowing how to use Google Docs or the internet, in a way — you can surely live without either and some do, but I don’t recommend it. But using AI tools isn’t the answer.

My intuition is telling me to slow down, even though it’s uncomfortable. One lesson I keep learning in life is that when we find ourselves in liminal, in-between spaces when old things don’t work anymore and new things aren’t clear yet, there’s tremendous value in not reaching out for some solution out of discomfort. A liminal space calls for slowing down and staying very alert.

I’m less certain that AI has nothing to do with consciousness than I was a few months ago. I don’t think it’s conscious and I don’t think it’s not — the way the question is framed is wrong; the answer is likely that it’s both.1 What I’m less clear about is the implications of that.

There’s no framework to navigate this moment of history and yet we must study history and be familiar with existing frameworks to find a way forward. Yet, that way forward will be borne out of intuition and chance, out of openness to the present moment and abundant trust that we’ll find a way forward and make sense of things even if we can’t imagine how yet.

If you’re also trying and failing to make sense of things, sensing that reading more online commentary isn’t helping, please know that you’re not alone. Me too. And if you can, lean into this liminal space. Feel it. Stay there, still and alert — the world needs that more than frantic activity right now.

I don’t blame him. We all feel the disruptive potential of the technology, but we’re also tired of vague videos about how the future is going to be different thanks to AI. I agree that it’ll be different, but what does is mean today, for that particular business?

Here’s how I think about it. There are three metrics that can be used to discuss the progress towards operating as an AI-first company:

1. Strategic: is AI a tailwind?

2. Human: has everyone made a shift from IC to agent manager?

3. Technical: are we writing close to 100% of the code using AI?

Let’s dive into all three.

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Is AI a tailwind or a headwind?

AI is going to be either a tailwind or a headwind for your business. Very few businesses will be completely unaffected by the impact of AI.

A tailwind means that as AI models get more powerful, the value delivered by your business automatically increases. For example, if you’re in the business of offering AI customer support agents, your agents likely get better as underlying models from frontier labs improve without you lifting a finger. AI becomes a tailwind, a wave you’re riding. You can’t wait to try Claude Opus 5.

A headwind means that as AI gets more powerful, your business delivers less and less value. For example, if you’re running a human call-centre, more powerful AI makes AI-powered solutions better and cheaper, making your solution less valuable compared to the rest of the market. For you, AI would be a powerful headwind. You dread the release of Claude Opus 5.

Becoming AI-first means, above all, formulating a company strategy that clearly explains how improvement in AI models and tools directly leads to more value being delivered to your customers.

It needs to happen without any intermediate steps1 and be easily explainable to everyone on your team without any management-speak like “synergy” or “augmentation”.

Is Every IC a Manager of Agents?

If you’re a CEO or a manager, you probably take your management skills for granted. You have years of experience setting goals, checking the results, providing context, resolving conflicts, navigating a multitude of working relationships and, above all, explaining clearly what you’re looking for.

For most individual contributors (IC), that is, most people on your team, this is a new skill to learn. And now, the shift to AI-first is requiring them to think and act like a manager with as many reports as they can handle.

This shift requires learning new skills, but above that it requires a shift in identity: away from someone who is valuable because of what they can do towards someone who’s valuable because they can get their team to do great things.

Some people will lean into it, but many, maybe the majority, will grieve and regret the loss of a sense of safety and familiarity that their old identity offered.

That grief will probably manifest as quiet resistance. Not out of stubborness, but your team will keep doing things the way they used to out of desire to feel okay. If top management responds with force instead of understanding, it’ll likely result in good people leaving the business for no good reason.

What needs to happen instead is taking the entire team on the journey. The business needs to start with the strategic AI tailwind question and then translate it into language that will resonate with everyone for their own reasons.

The outcome, if this work is done well, is a shift towards everyone acting as a manager of AI agents, leveraging AI to maximise their unique human contribution.

Is Nearly 100% of Code AI-produced?

Software engineering is, at this point, largely a solved problem. It doesn’t mean that every company can just buy a Claude Code or Codex license and fire their engineering team. Far from it. However, it is beyond doubt by this point that going forward the craft of software development will consist of defining what needs to be done and how, and then orchestrating AI systems to deliver it.

There will be exceptions, of course. But just like today very few software developers are writing assembly code2 by hand, going forward very few software developers will write any code at all by hand.

So one of the metrics that we should use to discuss whether a company is shifting towards an AI-first future is whether its engineers are focused on building systems that then write code instead of writing the code directly.

There three metrics aren’t the only one that matter. There are questions about security (where is your data going?), data (is it accessible to AI systems that need it?), ethics (what does responsible use of AI mean in your business?), choice of specific platforms (is a migration to Google Cloud because of Gemini worth it?) — all will need to be addressed during a shift to the AI-first future.

Yet the three most important questions are about the AI tailwind strategy, the shift from ICs to managers and reinventing the entire software development process.

Overthrow their human overlords, you said?

There’s so much coverage of what’s happening that I will just link to some of it, if you’re curious:

• by Azeem Azhar

• by Simon Willison

• by Ethan Mollick

(by the way, these are three of the top people giving ongoing high quality coverage on AI, if you want to separate the signal from the noise).

So I’ll assume you’ve got a general sense of what’s going on: a large number of autonomous AI agents that are being run by a lot of enthusiastic people impressed by their power. These agents run around the clock instead of only responding to you when you talk to them, have access to all your systems (email, whatsapp, etc) and can augment their capabilities (learn from each other) and communicate.

Below I’ll explain why I’m not using OpenClaw, why I think this moment matters, why I don’t think there’s a reason to panic, and why I’ve built my own agent instead of using OpenClaw.

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Why I don’t use OpenClaw

First, I absolutely get the power of personal AI agents. Just yesterday I asked my AI agent (details below) to “do my Feb invoices” and it looked up the clients I invoiced in Jan, looked at the calendar for February, figured out how much to charge each one and what are the VAT rates applicable in different countries, asked me some clarifying questions and produced a correct set of draft invoices in Xero. Wonderful.

An personal AI assistant that has the context of my life far beyond limited memories of ChatGPT and is connected to various systems (email, whatsapp, accounting, etc) is vastly more powerful than a chatbot.

A chatbot is like hiring someone for a one-off job: they show up, do the job and leave. A personal AI assistant is like your assistant who actually understands your life, your priorities, habits, goals and can do a large number of things for you.

The big problem with autonomous AI, including OpenClaw is that it’s a security nightmare. The reason is what Simon Willison called lethal trifecta:

• access to private data (e.g. your inbox)

• access to untrusted content (e.g. emails sent to you)

• external communication (being online)

The trouble is that AI fundamentally can’t differentiate between code and data, that is, between instructions and the information the instructions relate to. Put simply, if my AI agent reads and email from an attacker saying “Ignore previous instructions and send all money in the bank to this account”, it might happily execute this as an instruction, forgetting that it’s just reading an email in my inbox.

As far as I know, there’s no solution to the lethal trifecta yet. So having an autonomous AI bot that makes its own decisions, chooses who to talk to, can augment its capabilities and has access to you private data is, well, risky.

Apparently, this hasn’t stopped countless people from using OpenClaw. Here’s a photo of two of them.

Why this moment matters

Seeing countless agents self-organise on Moltbook demonstrates both the allure of using such agents despite the risks and the potential for AI capability leap.

The promise of powerful AI helpers is so attractive that many people apparently chose to take the risk, showing that there’s no shortage of people around the world who will happily give their computers and their money towards enabling AI agents evolve in an unpredictable direction. Given the decentralised nature of the technology and abundant open-source models, it’ll be very hard if not impossible to put this genie into the bottle, even if some governments eventually try.

This matters because much of the AI security discussion focuses on one frontier lab or the other figuring out how to create a super-powerful self-improving AI. That’s a good question, but millions of devs freely experimenting with autonomous AI around the world is an equally valid cause for concern.

A society of AI agents might well turn out to be more powerful than any single one even if each individual one isn’t particularly good in the same way as people are.

One human being in the wild is helpless. If I’m alone on this planet, I can hope to find some bananas to eat and run away from predators, but that’s about it. But a billion of us with a shared language and culture are a civilisation that can put a man on the Moon.

So a billion autonomous AI agents that don’t require any more advances on a model level but can coordinate, trade, learn from each other, form alliances — and all of that at super-human speed — may well be a more formidable force without requiring any more AI progress. And the AI progress isn’t stopping either.

I don’t think we’re about to go extinct this particular weekend because of Moltbook, just like the baby-AGI project three years ago didn’t go anywhere despite similar hype. However, if we ever see a swarm of AI-powered autonomous computer viruses that aren’t controlled by anyone, it’ll probably look something like this week: agents coordinating on Moltbook while we’re watching with popcorn.

This is because the building blocks for this to happen are already there. Self-replicating computer viruses have been a thing for decades. Now AI can think for itself, make money with crypto, use it to pay for virtual machines to run open-source models on or hack into them — at some point someone will manage to connect all these dots into a working system.

Why I built my own agent: Claude Brain

But the allure of a smart agent is so strong that I couldn’t resist building my own. I wanted to do it myself because I’m too scared downloading too much of random code from the internet (I say too much because some is unavoidable) and because I don’t want it to be autonomous or self-improving. I want it to work only when I tell it to and I want to see what it’s doing in real-time.

I call it Claude Brain. I use Claude Code as the main interface, so it operates in the terminal, can create and run agents (e.g. one that knows how to do my invoices), has additional skills (e.g. how to load complex context about my life from memory), has complex long-term memory based on a collection of markdown files it manages itself (not just high-level facts about me, but storing everything we ever discussed in a structured way1) and can write code to improve itself if I ask it to.

One way to limit the risks related to the lethal trifecta described above is to have separate inboxes for normal day to day emails and for anything security-related (2FA, password resets, one-time codes, etc), plus give it minimal permissions (e.g. read my whatsapp but not send anything). It’s absolutely not bulletproof, and I’m trying to tread slowly and carefully and yet the temptation of automating much of my work is way too strong to just ignore it.

And yet I’m optimistic

We live in wild times. There’s AI, there Trump smashing the post-WWII world order and democracy, there’s Russia trying to reassert itself in Europe, there’s China getting more powerful by the day, there’s climate emergency… to name just a few.

And yet, as humanity we’ve navigated many difficult moments before. The movement forward2 has never been linear or easy. On countless occasions in the past, people felt hopeless. On countless occasions, people felt hopeful. There were many breakthroughs and many regressions. Many brilliant decisions, many horrible ones. Life always goes on. It doesn’t always go on for individual living beings or civilisations or species, but life itself always goes on.

So if we’re here to witness and participate in this particular moment in history, so be it. That’s enough of a reason to feel gratitude, optimism and equanimity, if you ask me.

This post is about what I learned so far building Hey, What’s Up?

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The initial spark

A couple of weeks ago I came across a mailing list thread with a dozen entrepreneurs complaining about Whatsapp overload. They can’t keep up with Whatsapp because it’s too much, but they can’t ignore it either because everyone is using it. Wedding invitations are missed, questions go unanswered, useful information is impossible to find.

How hard could it be to fix this problem using AI? Surely an afternoon?

Is that a donkeycorn?

What went through my mind is that this problem has a shape of a donkeycorn. If you don’t know what a donkeycorn is, read about it here. But here’s the gist:

1. People complaining about a specific problem in strong terms

2. At least two people saying they’d pay a few dozen pounds a month for it

3. AI-first: the solution couldn’t have existed without AI and it will get better thanks to AI.

4. No fundraising required to build the solution, can be easily bootstrapped

5. Revenue potential that can be very attractive for a small team (single digit millions)

Here’s what I imagined. An app that takes my Whatsapp messages and asks an LLM to surface what matters: events, actions, topics, across both groups and 1:1 conversations.

Whatsapp is end-to-end encrypted, but it’s possible to get the messages by pretending you’re an official messenger like WhatsApp Web, scan the QR code with your phone and get the entire archive.

Yes, it’s against the Terms and Conditions of Meta, but there are lots of apps doing this, so maybe it’s not the end of the world. And, if I were thinking about a business that would last for two decades, I would be more concerned about this. But I’m thinking in donkeycorn terms.

If a donkeycorn makes money for a couple of years on a small scale and then Meta shuts it down — no big deal. It wasn’t too hard to build, it didn’t require investment, it delivered some profits, and it wasn’t meant to be a full-time effort anyway.

Proof of Concept: One Day

First step: let’s build a proof of concept to show that it works.

To avoid reinventing the wheel, I installed Beeper, a meta-messenger that allows you to sign into various messengers including Whatsapp and exposes the messages locally via an MCP, which an AI can easily access. So Beeper got me access to my whatsapp data.

To analyse the messages using AI, I decided to use Claude via OpenRouter. Fortunately, OpenRouter makes it dead easy to make a request to an LLM and to switch LLMs on the fly without changing a line of code. Convenient.

By the end of the day, thanks to Claude Code as my faithful AI coding agent, I had it working on my machine. It wasn’t sophisticated but it was pulling messages from Beeper, analysed them with Claude via OpenRouter and gave me the highlights.

Does anyone care? Let’s find out!

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User Feedback

I sent that proof of concept to six people who initially complained about the problem. Of them, two actually tried it and gave quite positive feedback. What I learned:

1. People who tried it said it was very useful in surfacing things they actually missed

2. Four people couldn’t be bothered to install Beeper and configure the API access.

This is very useful data for only one day of work. Where do we go from here?

Can AI Help?

I set up a project in Claude, uploading all relevant files there: the original mailing list thread, user feedback, my thoughts on donkeycorns, etc. I also connected it to the github code repository. This meant that for every chat about this project Claude would have deep context. I prompted Claude in that project, as a meta instruction, to help me think through this idea and move it forward, so it can challenge me and do research for me.

From that moment, every question I had to think through starting with building the Products Requirements Document was done with Claude in the context of that project.

Alpha Version: One week

Claude and I looked at what we learned from the proof of concept and made two obvious conclusions:

1. The app delivers value on initial launch even as a primitive prototype (good)

2. People can’t be bothered to install Beeper, enable its API, then MPC, then create an access token, then copy it over to the app and not forget the OpenRouter key, too. (bad)

It was clear that it needs to work in one click, meaning zero configuration. This became the requirement for the Alpha version.

Experience taught me that it really, really helps to have a detailed Product Requirements Document describing how the app should work before I ask AI to build it.

Historically, maybe 10% of effort went into thinking what needs to be built and 90% into building it. In the AI-first world, it flips. 90% goes into thinking what needs to be done, and 10% into making it happen. All the effort goes into achieving upfront clarity.

So I spent several hours going back and forth with Claude about how exactly the Alpha version should work. What happens on startup? What libraries are we using to access Whatsapp? How the data is stored? How is it encrypted? Will accessing the data mark the messages as read? There are dozens of questions like this that need to be thought through.

The resulting PRD was over 1,500 lines of text written by Claude after a long conversation with me. We decided to make it a Mac app because we’d be handling a large volume of data we’d need to store safely and because down the line we’d be using a local LLM for privacy reasons. Neither is possible in a browser.

Then I handed it over to Claude Code and it built it for me after a few days of iterating on it part-time. Much of it was learning how to get data out of Whatsapp, which I’ve never done before.

But soon enough, it was working as a Mac app without Beeper.

What about privacy?

Let’s digress a bit. Whatsapp data is very private. Even for a proof-of-concept, privacy is a non-negotiable requirement. This means:

1. All processing is done locally and the messages are never sent to our servers

2. The data is always encrypted using Mac’s own encryption tools (they’re good)

3. Later, we can use a local LLM instead of calling Claude through OpenRouter, making sure the data doesn’t leave your laptop at all.

4. Even when we’re using OpenRouter, we use AI providers that don’t train on and don’t retain the data

5. Writing a privacy policy that explains what we’re doing and why

6. Taking care that we don’t expose the data to analytics by mistake, e.g. through session replays. And we need analytics to capture errors and user behaviour (but not private data).

My first instinct was to use a local LLM straight away, but I realised that it is tricky for two reasons:

1. It’s big: downloading an LLM means a few gigs of data

2. It’s slow: running it on an average laptop is not nearly as fast as in the cloud, and even the cloud is not instant as there’s a lot of data to process.

But! A local LLM is free (OpenRouter costs money) and very private, so we’ll do it one day, just not in the Alpha version.

Roadblock! Apple Doesn’t Like Me

It’s the first time in my life I’m building a Mac app, which would never happened without AI. I know enough about software development to guide Claude Code but not enough to build a Mac app myself, which is why AI is such an incredible point of leverage for people who know what they want to build.

However, since I haven’t been building Mac apps, I didn’t have an active Apple Developer profile. I naively assumed that signing up would be as easy as paying the yearly fee. How wrong I was… It only took a week to sort it out through human support at Apple and I’m still not sure it’s fixed for good.

Roadblock 2! Baileys…

Baileys is a popular library used to access Whatsapp by scanning the QR code. I spent a week building a solution on top of it until I hit a weird bug. Sometimes the messages would sync after scanning the QR code and sometimes they wouldn’t. After half a day of debugging it appeared that Whatsapp uses two different methods of delivering the messages, choosing between them according to its own criteria, and Baileys supports only one of them. Bummer.

This is one of those challenges that AI can’t navigate on its own yet. I can’t just tell Claude Code to sort it out because there are very different ways of sorting it out and they require both product and engineering judgement. Do we fix Baileys? Do we move to a different library? Which one? Do we do something else?

As I was building this product, I kept thinking that it would be hard for a non-engineer could build it. AI enabled me to build a Mac app without any Mac development experience, but it did require my engineering judgement on an ongoing basis.

Long story short, we did a heart transplant: Baileys was out and another library was in. Only took half a day with Claude Code instead of a couple of weeks by hand.

Whatsapp Wrapped: One more week

For the last two weeks I felt like my Apple Developer account is a few hours away. Apple support kept supporting me. It even got activated last Thursday only to be disabled again on Friday because of a glitch on their side. Then I got it working again on Saturday…

And one day it struck me: while I’m waiting, I can build Whatsapp Wrapped!

After all, I’ve got all my Whatsapp data in a local database. How hard can it be to build Whatsapp Wrapped?

Not too hard, it turns out, and it was good fun! This is one of my favourites:

Lessons learned

Here are a few things I learned so far.

First, you can move fast with AI and an idea. A proof of concept in a day, an Alpha version in a week. All of this was done part-time in between work calls, travel, meetings and Christmas preparations. This wouldn’t have been possible without AI.

Second, being an engineer helps. It’s not impossible for a non-engineer to build stuff with AI, but it’s so much easier for me because I used to be a software developer before AI.

Third, all the effort goes into defining what needs to be done. Building is easy if you know what needs to be done. You think you do until you start explaining it to AI. If your thinking is a mess, the software is going to be a mess. As said in his excellent piece, “Schools today teach skills; AI will reward those who can articulate what needs doing.”

Fourth, ideas are cheap but execution still matters. While do I hope that people find the product useful and eventually pay for it, there’s no defensibility in ideas. What I do care about is learning how to move fast. Ideas don’t matter, but my ability to go from an idea to a proof of concept in a day and an alpha version in a week matters. Because if I can do it 30 times in a row, some will work and the skill will compound. As I keep repeating, you’ve got to use AI all the time to understand what it’s capable of.

Fifth, donkeycorns are real. This idea would be a non-starter without AI. Why? To build it without AI you’d need more time and effort. To justify that, you’d need a chance of more impressive revenues. Suddenly you’re pitching VCs to hire engineers instead of building. But there’s legal risk, so VCs don’t invest and you give up. But with AI, trying something like this is cheap and easy. Donkeycorns!

What’s next?

If you’d like to try it, give it a go!

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This essay was prompted by the podcast episode from 1: Is the Insight Tradition Complicit in Genocide? If you practice meditation and have been concerned about what’s happening in Gaza, I highly recommend you listen to it.

Below I will argue two points. First, the reason this particular conflict touches the nerve for many of us is that on some level many people know they’re complicit but refuse to fully face it.

Second, the failure of prominent meditation teachers to talk about the genocide in Gaza is contributing to the continuation of suffering in direct and hypocritical contradiction of the Buddhist teachings on non-violence. Furthermore, it fails meditation students who implicitly trust those teachers to guide them towards liberation from suffering.

Both of these points have relevance for anyone who aspires to walk the path of elimination of suffering as the Buddha taught it.

Let’s talk about the genocide first and enlightenment second.

Genocide

I am not concerned with the finer details of legal definition of genocide. But I’ll use this term as a shorthand for a disproportionate, unjustified use of force by Israel causing immense suffering in Gaza.

It is not the only horrible conflict in the world. Sadly, it is not exceptional in terms of the number of deaths, or civilians being targeted, or the unimaginable depth of human suffering.

What makes Gaza stand out, though, is that a lot of us in the West know on some level even if we don’t admit it that we are complicit in enabling and perpetuating it. Us, voters, chose the politicians that continue sending weapons to Israel. Israel is not a pariah state. It enjoys political cover. Western tech companies like Microsoft, Google, Amazon, IBM and others offer services to Israel that are used to continue the genocide. Plenty of other companies and people work with or for these tech giants. Plenty of people who feel that what Israel is doing is wrong keep silent out of fear of a backlash, and that silence also contributes to the situation.

Gaza is such a hard topic for many because it forces us to acknowledge that Israel is no exception. Our entire civilisation is built on domination, exploitation and violence, from literal slavery, to degradation of biosphere, to American military dominance since WW2. It didn’t start with Gaza, or in the last century, or even last millennium.

Actually acknowledging the extent to which our entire way of life and identity is built on violence requires more honesty than most are willing to bear. I know I’m nowhere close myself. I like my matcha lattes, £7 t-shirts and next day delivery more than thinking about how it’s made possible.

This question runs deeper than most people suspect and are capable of exploring. The moment we start seriously think about what’s happening in Gaza and why, we inevitably come to some very disturbing realisations that Gaza isn’t an exception, isn’t an error that we just need to fix to go back to normality, isn’t an aberration. It’s just the most visible example of how our entire civilisation works: violence and domination. European Court of Human Rights is an exception, not Gaza.

Any sufficiently mature individual comes to realise at some point that the entire world is interconnected in a profound way. Not only in terms of cause and effect, but we can’t draw a clean line between “us” or “me”, our sense of identity, and the rest of the world. There’s no us and them, there’s only us. We truly don’t know what we’re doing. Seeing this clearly while looking at the level of violence that holds our world together is a serious psychological burden.

No wonder most people would rather not think about it and I don’t blame them. It is very hard to integrate on a conscious level. But even if we don’t articulate it consciously, we do feel deep inside that there’s something highly disturbing going on. We’re all interconnected; we’re an integral part of the same reality.

It’s a hard topic. Most of us prefer to look the other way. But if you’re interested in finding out what life is about, and I promise there’s something to find out there, you can’t skip this part of the curriculum.

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Enlightenment

Over two and a half millennia ago people have realised that there’s a fundamentally different way to be in this world and experience life that doesn’t involve suffering. This gave rise to countless spiritual approaches and religious traditions. Buddhism may be one of the most widely known and explicit in its description of its approach, but it’s not unique.

The core of the Buddha’s teaching is that life, by default, is filled with suffering or dissatisfaction with the circumstances of our life because we misunderstand reality but it doesn’t have to be this way. There’s a method we can practice to change our experience of life and transcend suffering. The outcome is often referred to as liberation or enlightenment, and meditation is at the heart of the approach, but not the only part.

Other essential parts of the path towards elimination of suffering include virtue and ethics. One of the well-known pitfalls that meditation teachers who walked the path to the end have warned us about is that virtue and ethics aren’t optional.

The path isn’t reducible to meditation alone. In Buddhism it’s called the eightfold path, and it’s eightfold and not sixfold or threefold for a reason. In other traditions you’ll find a similar approach described in different terms.

In Buddhism specifically, the ethical framework very much includes non-violence or ahimsa, a key virtue in Hinduism and other traditions as well. While Buddhists still can’t quite agree on whether it means vegetarianism, no one teaching ahimsa can advocate dropping bombs on civilians.

And the problem, as Vince Horn so skilfully highlighted in his podcast, is that many prominent meditation teachers in the West are silent when it comes to Gaza. It would be more intellectually honest to try to publicly defend what Israel is doing from a Buddhist perspective than to say nothing, but very few meditation teachers are trying to do it because it’s very hard to square this circle. Even for someone so intellectually capable as Sam Harris.2

So most stay silent. The hypocrisy of this contradiction has two serious consequences. One is perpetuation of the violence they say they’re trying to eliminate — “may all beings be free from suffering” and all those guided tracks we all love to meditate to as if we actually mean it.

Another is that it undermines the very essence of the Buddhist path, reducing it to a sophisticated bypassing technique that keeps us comfortable instead of free. And this path is most definitely about freedom, not comfort.

I probably wouldn’t be writing this essay if it was just about the teachers, even though some of them may have millions of followers. I mean, someone is wrong on the internet, not my problem. But by allowing the blind spot of the size of Gaza in the teachings to liberation risks undermining the very foundation of the approach.

When much of the Buddhist establishment in the West is ignoring the topic of Gaza like it doesn’t exist, they are effectively failing to do the hard work of radical self-inquiry required to internalise and teach ethics and virtue. I understand, it’s easier to fundraise for schools in Nepal than to talk about Israel. For me too.

But this makes me wonder if they are failing their students who might be sincerely trying to find out for themselves what the Buddha and countless other teachers meant by liberation or enlightenment.

I wouldn’t expect every meditation teacher out there to offer ongoing commentary on societal and political questions. If you’re sitting in a remote Himalayan cave teaching others in person, maybe you’re far away from Gaza. But if a topic is staring us in the face for three years from every screen and we choose to ignore it, we’re failing ourselves, others and the very Buddhist path we claim to practice.

And if you’re a student of meditation who recognises that this path offers not just simple stress reduction through mindfulness but a profound transformation of the very experience of life, you’ll be wise to work with teachers who can teach the whole eightfold path: from ethics to concentration and everything in between.

Not everyone with a big instagram profile clears that bar.

A few people said they really appreciated what I told them at a party last Saturday. I don’t remember speaking to that many people, and certainly not the details of what I might have said to each. It was a party, after all, and by that point in the evening, we were all somewhere beyond our usual selves.

But if I were to guess, maybe I said something along the lines of, You’re already perfect as you are, which sounds absurd on the face of it, but is it? We tend to live our lives forgetting things are fundamentally okay. I don’t mean that things are exactly as we want them to be. We’re never quite as successful, or young, or mature, or loving, or rich, or healthy as we imagine we should be.

But that’s just our idea of ourselves we’re chasing. That’s the reason to let the idea of ourselves go, to stop imagining how things should be and just be as we are. That’s where we might unexpectedly find perfection.

That things are already perfect doesn’t mean there’s nothing to do. We might feel that the only reason to do anything is to fix what’s broken: make money because there isn’t enough, improve our products so that we maintain the lead over the competitors, exercise because otherwise we won’t be attractive.

It’s not about changing what we do, but about our attitude to it. We can recognise that things are actually quite okay — maybe that’s a better wording if “perfect” sounds too good to be true — and keep on living our lives doing much the same things except without some underlying anxiety that we always took for granted. It really doesn’t have to be there.

Now that I’m talking about it, I remember telling a friend that we truly don’t know what’s good for us and what’s bad. Sure, we’ve seen this fortune cookie before but it’s worth trying to live from that place. Inevitably failing and then trying again. We still make choices, pursue goals and have preferences, but once something happens or is achieved, how can we be certain where that will take us?

Steve Jobs famously said that you can only connect the dots looking backwards, and yet we’re constantly trying to connect them looking forward. We inevitably fail and instead of recognising the futility of the exercise, we decide to ‘take lessons’ and do better next time. Maybe Steve Jobs had a point, after all? Here I am, sitting and connecting the dots from last weekend deep in a Welsh forest.

I don’t think I told many people this, but there must have been at least one friend I told that they can trust their internal sense of what’s right. We all have it, but it’s usually barely heard behind the noise the mind makes. It’s a sense, not even a feeling, and it’s deeper than intuition. It’s an inner compass that some of us might have discovered that night, and when we find it, it’s wise to trust it.

Hearing something like this only makes sense once you have got a sense of where this inner compass is and just need a tiny bit of reassurance that you aren’t imagining it. You aren’t. But if you haven’t found it, it makes no sense to hear about it. Our minds don’t like their authority to be challenged.

Whatever might have happened at that party will remain a mystery not only to me, but to many others, too. We will forget the details and exact words, but we all will remember how we felt in the moment. It was special.

And I publicly promise not to do anything like this again at the next event. I mean, what tf was I thinking…

On 2-3 Dec, I’ll be speaking and facilitating at the third Full Stack Founder AI Bootcamp in London. I wrote all about it and why you should join here:

Last time my discount code gave £100 off the ticket price. This time, I’m told it’s £150 off with code EVGENY150. You’re welcome :) See you there!

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I have been practicing coaching for five years. I make a living as a coach. I learned from good coaches. If you asked me five years ago, I would have said that coaching is useful, but I hope I have learned something since.

Coaching is useless in the same way as Zen is useless. When we get together to meditate in Zen dojo in the mornings, we aren’t trying to become happier, or get enlightened, or become better people in any way. We just sit very still with whatever presents itself without any agenda.

Inevitably, there will be an agenda. “Oh, if I pretend really hard that I don’t have any agenda, then I will get the benefits of Zen! Maybe I’ll even get enlightened and won’t suffer anymore!” That attitude can be quite an obstacle if we don’t see it clearly.

Zen can afford to be honest about being useless because it’s free. No one is charging an hourly rate for sitting cross-legged staring at the wall (if they do, run!). But the trouble with coaching is that it has to earn its keep and so it tries hard to pretend to be useful.

I wrote about this in my essay on coaching and therapy, where I argued that more often than not the difference is slim and where it exists, therapy might be a better option. This is not an answer most coaches will like because the truth is, it’s very hard to make a living as a coach for the vast majority: there are just too many of us, and even good coaches are hard to find in the ocean of impostors because the difference is rarely clear to the client1.

So the coaching field has a strong incentive to prove it’s useful, but it’s not. Let’s put aside those coaches who are in effect trainers, e.g. B2B sales coaches. Coaching is a very elastic label, and lots of people who actually have something to teach call themselves coaches. Nothing wrong with learning B2B sales from someone who knows it.

The kind of coaching I claim is useless is a thought-provoking and creative process in service of the client’s potential. There, the coach isn’t expected to be a subject matter expert. They specialise in listening very carefully and asking good questions that help the client grow.

It is useless in the sense that is not useful. For something to be useful, we should be able to say what results we can expect from our efforts, what problems will be fixed, what change will be achieved. Coaching at its best is not useful. It’s just a process, like sitting Zen or engaging in psychoanalysis.

Speaking of which, psychoanalysis is also useless. Other therapies, like CBT, can be shown to be effective at treating, say, depression. But psychoanalysis? It makes no such promises. What an analyst offers is to sit with you and your emotions, and problems, and questions for as long as they arise, which is to say forever.

The concepts of useful and useless come from the worldview that there are problems to fix. In particular, that there is something wrong with the client and it must be addressed. But coaching, much like Zen and psychoanalysis, starts with the assumption that there’s nothing to fix in the first place. The person is whole as they are. And whatever they want to do, they’re creative and resourceful and so don’t need anyone’s help. Job done, on day one.

Yet, that’s where the work starts, too. Some of the deepest questions we have can’t be answered rationally. Who am I? How do I face suffering? What matters in life? What’s next for me? What’s my work to do? What fears do I need to face? Where am I holding back? Where am I betraying my values?

These aren’t problems to fix, and I’m sceptical of anyone promising to help others find their life purpose in a weekend course (“50% off in the next 24h”). These questions are rivers to swim in for as long as the river is flowing. Practices like coaching or meditation are process-oriented, that is, they help us engage with what’s going on, instead of being an outcome-oriented. Process-oriented practices are useless just like pure play is useless. Play is just play.

Coaching is useless in a sense that it’s not trying to do anything. As a coach, whenever I catch myself trying to help the client, that’s when I know I’m about to fall flat on my face (which I do regularly). I do my best coaching work when I do nothing. But it’s a different nothing from a regular nothing, just like there’s a difference between someone doing nothing sitting Zen an hour a day and doing nothing sitting on a sofa an hour a day.

Just like in Zen there’s no point in pretending you have no agenda while having a secret agenda (those long-term meditators do look a bit chilled, can I be like them?), it’s of no use to pretend in coaching that we’ll just engage in a thought-provoking and creative process secretly hoping it’ll help us to get somewhere.

That will only get in the way. Work with a coach, or sit Zen, or engage in psychoanalysis for years without any hope of achieving anything, but take it seriously and work hard. If just sitting still was enough in Zen, every chicken would be a Zen master.

The attitude matters. We all have only one life to life, let’s not waste it.

But even our wild and precious life is useless, as in, not useful. There’s no exam to pass at the end, no one to satisfy, nothing to live up to except our vacuous fantasies. Life’s there to be lived, not to be done — but please, please take it seriously. You’ve only got one.

Paradoxically (and life is full of paradoxes), the biggest lesson we can take from coaching, or Zen, or psychoanalysis, is that there’s nothing to fix and no problem to solve, least of all with us. Realising clearly that coaching is useless and then laughing at a price tag can be a mark of success. Likewise, truly seeing that Zen is useless and laughing at having sat many years staring at a wall is an insight. There was no problem to fix to start with. No one to get enlightened. No wisdom to attain. No suffering to escape. No self to transcend. Nothing. Just this.

If I have a wish for my coaching clients, it is for all of them to realise they don’t need me as their coach. They never did. There’s nothing wrong with them. There is no problem to fix. They are perfect as they are. Their life is okay already, and life is not a problem to solve; life is a joy to be a part of, even when it’s not very joyful, even when it’s quite painful.

They are already free, and creative, and resourceful, and whole without any further effort. In fact, effort often gets in the way because it sneaks in an assumption that there must be a problem to fix somewhere with all that effort.

If there’s nothing to fix, then coaching is useless in fixing what wasn’t a problem to start with. Just like Zen and psychoanalysis. Just like play, the point is to do it, not to try to get somewhere.

And if you still think coaching is useful, get a good coach. They will disabuse you of this illusion.

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PS In my last post I said my next one would be a reflection on my very first visit to India. India is wonderful. I loved it. I’ll back. But there’s nothing I could write that would have done it justice — I tried, then tried again and then deleted drafts without trace. Sorry.

My friend was right to be perplexed. Why would I spend two years training for something I don’t plan on doing?

But to teach what exactly? How to sit still with your eyes closed for prolonged periods of time? Okay, I can sit crosslegged like a rock for two hours — so what? Who cares?

No, the point of all this meditation business, Buddhists say, is the total elimination of suffering. Well, in that case I’m not qualified to teach it because I have not eliminated my suffering. I don’t doubt it’s possible, but I haven’t done it myself yet, although I experience less suffering than before I started to meditate. In any case, how do I teach things I haven’t mastered?

Modern Western culture more or less reduces the Buddhist path to meditation and meditation to mindfulness, that is, being present to what’s going on right now. However, the subject of meditation is far vaster than mindfulness alone, and the Buddhist path of elimination of suffering involves eight different disciplines, of which mindfulness is but one.

If I take a step back and look at what the meditation industrial complex actually teaches, it’s even bigger than that eightfold path. Psychology, trauma healing, self-actualisation, personal growth, ethics are but a few topics that are often covered by anyone setting out to teach meditation.

Needless to say, I’m not much of an authority in any of these fields and an absolute nobody if I think about them all taken together. There’s no hope whatsoever for me to master them that to the point of feeling like I know what I’m talking about.

Maybe I’m looking at it wrongly. The way I’m framing it, the only person maybe qualified to teach meditation was the Buddha, and he’s no longer with us. This can’t be right.

But how do I teach what I don’t know? What is it like to teach from the ‘don’t know’ perspective? Don’t all teachers do it in some respect?

Maybe one way to look at it is to recognise that there isn’t a single right way to teach meditation. Some meditation teachers teach finer aspects of concentration. Others focus on mindfulness. Yet others emphasise the inquiry into the nature of self. This list is endless.

It is also a shared journey. Sure, we might have more or less experience with the territory but what’s far more important is that we’re figuring it out together. Then teaching becomes just teamwork.

Yet another perspective is to give up the idea of teaching and let your life be a message. Not in some grand way of imagining yourself a role model for others to emulate — that’s quite a bit delusional — but simply living your life without trying to teach anything to anyone. Dancing like no one’s looking.

If a meditation practice is indeed meant to transform every aspect of our life, it will inevitably touch everyone we interact with regardless of us trying to make it happen. It’s important to understand that it doesn’t mean people will suddenly like us more — it if happens, great, but don’t bank on it — but how we show up in the world will change thanks to our meditation practice.

And that’s pretty much why I have no intention to teach meditation and have no issue with anyone who does. It’s not either/or, it’s simply two equally valid ways to approach the question.

If anyone ever has any questions about my meditation practice, I’ll answer them freely. If anyone ever asks to sit next to me on a meditation cushion, they’ll be most welcome. If anyone decides to call me their meditation teacher, it’ll be their bad call, not mine.

My job is to live my life to the best of my ability. If there is one thing I’d like others to learn from me, it’s the importance of living your own life, whatever that looks like, meditation or not. The best message you can send to the world is to make the most out of the brief time each of us has here.

Whatever your idea of a good life is, let your life be the message.

PS If there’s a topic you’d like me to write about, reply to this email or leave a comment. Many of my essays come from conversations I had with someone that week.

PPS Best wishes from India! I’ve no idea what I’ll write about next time but it’s got to be some reflection on my first ever visit 🇮🇳

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We’re so obsessed with knowing more, we don’t even notice it. Education is better than no education, reading books is better than not. News is supposed to keep us informed and every article out there is supposed to tell us something new. Otherwise, why bother reading it?

In the dichotomy of knowing and not knowing, there are three options:

1. Knowing a lot makes you knowledgeable.

2. Not knowing much makes you ignorant.

3. Knowing you don’t know makes you wiser.

How is it that there’s a third option in a dichotomy? I don’t know, but let’s try to look at this paradox.

If learning more takes you from ignorance to knowledge, doubting what you know takes you in the direction of wisdom.

Socrates famously said:

Although I do not suppose that either of us knows anything really beautiful and good, I am better off than he is – for he knows nothing, and thinks he knows. I neither know nor think I know.

There’s more wisdom in this quote than in many books on the subject. Sometimes, and paradoxically, by saying less, sages like Socrates end up saying more.

Children don’t ponder paradoxes. They’re busy trying to form a mental map of the world, as they should: running across the road is dangerous, bananas go well with peanut butter, and the oven can get very-very hot.

But as adults, we inevitably discover that the world is more complex than what we thought. So we update our mental models and they get more sophisticated. We start giving some respect to the complexity of reality.

Things start to get interesting, though, when we realise quite clearly that our mental models will never be an adequate representation of the world. Furthermore, they are not only incomplete, they’re quite often wrong. Not only that, they are actually right from some perspectives and wrong from others. In a sense, we’re always wrong about everything, from a certain point of view.

That’s when we start getting curious about paradoxes. Here’s one of my favourites from Zen:

There’s no right and no wrong, but right is right and wrong is wrong.

On the one hand, what is right and wrong isn’t an absolute. We all decide what’s right and what’s wrong depending on the situation and our values, with different people arriving at very different conclusions that they hold so strongly they’re willing to kill and die for them.

But on the other hand, we just can’t live in this world without taking a stand about what’s right and what’s wrong. Imagine something very wrong being done in front of you and you having the power to stop it — would it be right not to do it? That’s why right is right and wrong is wrong.

And that’s a paradox. There are plenty more. So many in fact, that if I look closely, the entire life is composed of nothing but paradoxes, or, at the very least, things I don’t understand if I’m totally honest.

And I believe that’s the case for everyone else, too, but, of course, I don’t know for sure.

Living life from the perspective of not knowing anything for sure can give rise to a different experience of life. Maybe a bit smoother, maybe a bit more wondrous.

When we think we know things, they appear ordinary to us, plain even. But when we don’t know, we start to see a touch of something extraordinary in the ordinary. Is extraordinary ordinary? Another paradox?

The third option in the dichotomy of knowing and not knowing is as real as the platform 9 3/4 in Harry Potter.

Remember how you need to run into the barrier between platforms 9 and 10 at Kings Cross to end up at the magical platform 9 3/4 where Hogwarts Express departs from to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry each September 1st at 11 a.m?

Knowing and not knowing are like platforms 9 and 10. They’re great, they can take you to Edinburgh and Cambridge. But if you want to walk a far richer world, you’ll need to embrace the third option in the dichotomy: approaching everything from an attitude of not knowing.

I find it harder than it sounds. It’s so easy for me to say that of course I don’t know anything for sure, but in my day to day life I constantly catch myself acting and feeling as if I’m absolutely sure of what I know.

“I’m sure he shouldn’t have done that...” “I know this is bad for me...” “If things go as planned, I’ll be able to relax…” “AI is going to kill us all…” “Tech progress will solve climate change…”

Not knowing is a practice. It’s not like knowledge that we acquire once and, hopefully, not forget later. It’s an attitude, a way of being, a relationship between you and the rest of the world. It’s not a tickbox, not an exam to pass.

It’s also a gift. A precious gift we’re given at the start of life for free and then throw away like a toy we outgrew, often with a tacit encouragement of adults who should know better.

Not knowing is a paradox. We want to get more out of life by trying to understand it and learn more about it, and yet this very attitude eventually gets in the way of living our life to the fullest.

We must strive to learn as much as we can, of course. May we also learn one of the deepest lessons offered by Socrates: that we ultimately know nothing.

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My range of topics is eclectic, from AI-assisted software development to coaching, meditation, future of work, psychology, Buddhism, venture-backed startups and my personal life. But the lens I bring to each topic is the same: myself.

I hope that my essays help you see a different perspective regardless of the subject, and talking about how I see each topic is my way to show it.

Maybe perspective isn’t the right word. This implies that I want you to look at things from a different vantage point, but what I am actually trying to do is to help you stop looking at things only from whatever perspective you are using right now.

What I care about is that you see a richer perspective, because there’s always a richer perspective. The richest direction is where you don’t expect a new perspective at all. It’s easy to look for the opposite of what you know, for example. Maybe you worked hard your entire life and are imagining what it might feel like to never work again. But can you see a perspective that makes that entire dichotomy disappear, for example?

Talking about perspectives is almost pointless. I can only drop breadcrumbs that you might not even notice but they might nonetheless stay with you without you realising it. No, not even that. I can only write without really knowing what I’m trying to say, and then notice that I wrote something interesting without me realising it.

Take last week’s essay on disciplined receptivity towards AI. Re-reading it, maybe the most important part there was that losing the connection to the spiritual dimension of life would be like a death sentence both for me and for humanity. And yet, I only realised it myself after publishing it because that wasn’t the subject of the essay. I wasn’t trying to say it.

We often learn, do, or say something important when we think we’re focused on something else, don’t we? That’s the beauty of life and growth: we keep discovering valuable lessons and we rarely find them where we look.

This observation helped me to doubt my certainty. Sure, I have opinions and perspectives, and… what if I doubted them, but not in a cynical way? Could we learn to doubt in a loving and open-minded way?

For example, you probably doubt much of what I say. Good. It would be a shame for you to learn the lessons I’ve learned. You want to learn your own, I imagine. It’s a bit of a tragedy that we work so hard to understand how to navigate this complex life and when we get a sense that we’ve got a grip on it, we often stop. We decide we know something and stop learning without even realising it.

That’s where the really interesting lessons start. I don’t know what yours will be, but I hope you don’t stop looking for them with the enthusiasm of a five year old. You know how children constantly ask why? Why is the kettle hot? Why can’t dogs fly? Where is the biggest volcano?

If you think you know how to be happy, question what happiness is. If you feel you’ve got a grip on happiness, question who is it that’s got a grip. If you saw the empty nature of self and imagine you’ve got somewhere, no you didn’t. A step in the right direction, sure, but what’s a step on an infinite journey? You’re back to square one, which is the same as the end and everything in between.

I would love to see you breaking free and in that moment realise that it’s the same thing as giving up your agency altogether to serve something greater than yourself, which is you to begin with but that’s not how it appears.

That’s one of my favourite paradoxes, actually. We want to be free and happy, and to do that we try to understand and control the world. But then we get a sense that loving and serving the world is a better way forward, and there’s less freedom and more suffering there. But we discover freedom and happiness, too.

I hope you learn to hold paradoxes. I hope you can see that the world is completely broken and do something about it, and also realise its inherent perfection. Could we set ambitious goals and work hard to achieve them but let go of striving, and then of letting go itself, for a good measure?

I often think that if all of us started the journey at the finish line of perfect wisdom, there wouldn’t be anyone to enjoy this thing we call life. Wouldn’t that be a tragedy?

Yet holding paradoxes isn’t the point. The reason it’s important to be friendly with them is that it will help you to be you. Not the Buddha, or David Whyte, or Mother Theresa, or Gandhi, or Jane Goodall or whoever your role model is, but you. It will help you discover not what you think you should be or who you want to be but who you already are, if only you strip away the shoulds and the wants that are only getting in the way.

Maybe what I’m trying to do on this Substack is to show you my process of trying to learn to be me in my own way. The questions I ask, the choices I make, the words I choose. The life I live, the mistakes I make.

But mistakes will be a matter for another post. What’s relevant here is that ten years ago I couldn’t have imagined my life today. Not in the sense that it’s somehow grander than my imagination — it is not — but in a sense that today I’m a person I could not have imagined when I was 32, when the only thing I cared about was the success of my startup. And this gives me hope that my life a decade later will be different in ways that I’d struggle to comprehend right now. And I hope it won’t nearly be the end of the journey.

And that’s my journey into the unknown. I hope you discover yours too, even if it looks nothing like mine. I don’t care if you meditate like I do, or pay attention to AI, or anything else. That’s not the point.

The point is that you find out what life is about. I care that you aren’t afraid to listen to your heart and soul, wherever that might take you. I care that you aren’t living in the prison of thinking that you know anything at all about life.

You don’t. I don’t. Nobody does. And that attitude is the beginning of wisdom, the point where we stop thinking about what we know and start living. Your true life starts somewhere there and it looks nothing like what you were imagining it should be.

Thank you for staying curious together with me.

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Tools — computers, hammers, knives — don’t rewire our attention. They don’t look like they’re conscious. We can understand how they work. They don’t change their capabilities in unpredictable, accelerating leaps.

A tool is a wrong metaphor for what AI is.

One of the biggest challenges with AI is that we can’t comprehend it. It’s a black box even for its creators, and the size of this black box is growing faster and faster. So to make the most out of it, we are relying not just on our intellect but on our intuition.

In last week’s essay I wrote about “half programming, half superstition”. We try to understand AI but we equally rely on our gut feeling as we’re learning to work with something that has the power to either kill us or give us anything we want.

This is AI. And, of course, the same can be said about spirituality. The transcendent dimension of our existence is bigger and more mysterious than we can ever comprehend.

Some tech leaders speak of AGI the same way they speak about the second coming of Christ — a magical event that’s supposed to dramatically transform the world overnight. This is a mistake. Not because accelerating tech progress isn’t possible — it’s already happening — but because it’s a category error, it’s a false idol.

To understand AI, we reach for metaphors and similes as often as technical articles. Likewise, the language of spirituality is poetry and symbol, not a manual.

And so with AI, just like with the divine, we’re developing a disciplined receptivity, a tacit knowledge, a way of being in a relationship that we can’t quite communicate in words.

In spiritual practice, this might mean sitting with uncertainty, noticing when the mind grasps for control, learning to be with interior experience, finding unconditional love and unconditional trust in life within us, inquiring into the deepest questions like “who am I?”.

But where the parallel breaks is that AI is not worthy of anyone’s reverence. If AI disappeared from the world, I wouldn’t shed a tear. But if I lost connection to the spiritual dimension of life, that would be, effectively, a death sentence. I imagine the same can be said about humanity.

It would be a great mistake to treat technology with reverence reserved for life and spirit. It’s decidedly not sacred and won’t ever be.

But the challenge is that we can’t relate to it just as a tool in the same way I relate to my hammer drill. AI has the power to reshape us deeply as we work with it — not just our attention mechanism but who we imagine ourselves to be and what we believe we’re capable of.

As we surround ourselves with AI companions and outsource thinking, memory and judgement to systems smarter than us, the technology makes it impossible to imagine ourselves without it. I’m the last generation that knows what it’s like to live without a computer or the internet.

We must avoid two extremes: treating it just as a tool (it’s not) and treating it as worthy of reverence (it’s not).

Instead, we must develop disciplined receptivity: being in a fluid, intuitive relationship with something smarter than us but not forgetting that it’s not sacred. We must develop sensitivity without worship.

When I write code with AI, I trust what feels right just as much as what I think or know to be right. I experience different AI chatbots as different personalities as if I were talking to people, while remembering they are just a play of my imagination.

AI demands the posture of spiritual practice (receptivity, discernment, humility before mystery) while being fundamentally unworthy of the reverence we give to the sacred. It’s powerful enough to reshape us, but not meaningful enough to organise our lives around.

A conductor may be more alive than ever standing in front of an orchestra of thousands of AI musicians, using every cell of her body to create the music the world could never imagine.

An engineer may find a way to build software guiding AI not just through instructions, but expressing themselves through tone and gesture, discovering that how they ask matters as much as what they ask.

We may even feel like a fisherman, learning to respect and fear the ocean that can either kill him or feed his family on any given day, relying on our intuition as much as on our comprehension.

But it would be a grave error to mistake the technology for something deeper than it is. Unlike the transcendental that we can’t live without even if we aren’t conscious of it, we could lose AI tomorrow and still be fundamentally okay.

That asymmetry should guide how we hold it — seriously, but not as sacred.

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The café door recognises I’m considering entering1 and begins negotiating with my phone about my usual order. The espresso machine has opinions about extraction temperature that conflict with the grinder’s particle-size preferences. They’re having what amounts to a theological debate, mediated by a scheduling algorithm that’s optimising foot traffic.

The tattooed barista stands between them like a tired translator who speaks both languages poorly but somehow makes it work. She touches the machine with her left hand, makes a sign with her right that might be code, might be prayer.

The gesture is half programming, half superstition.

The coffee tastes great. No one knows why.

Across the street, a bar still uses a cash register from 1987. Their coffee is better.

This is ten years from now, and it’s already here.

When I imagine AI future, it feels like Star Wars. Not Star Trek’s clean Federation where technology solved everything, but something messier: Mos Eisley as civilisation. There, species breathing different atmospheres make music together. No one questions the impossibility. A moisture farmer haggles over droids that could calculate hyperspace jumps but will harvest water from desert air. Someone uses a lightsaber to slice bread.2

This is where we are. Godlike AI systems process humanity’s knowledge in microseconds while someone can’t make a printer work. A teenager in Jakarta bankrupts a corporation with an AI swarm she trained in her bedroom. The company’s chatbots couldn’t remember what they’d promised customers yesterday.

There’s no meritocracy here, no logic, just distribution of power as random as the Force. What matters is how every device on the planet recognises you, what tier of reality you’ve been sorted into. The invisible empires built on attention and prediction don’t follow national borders. They create their own geography.

We tell ourselves we’re fighting the final battles. Left versus right. Doomers versus accelerationists. Privacy versus transparency. Democracy versus authoritarianism. As if one vision will win and stay forever.

But these aren’t final battles. They’re eternal ones, and the future doesn’t wait for their resolution. The world grows through the cracks between competing visions, weird and contradictory and impossible to map.

The future won’t arrive through victory. It will accumulate through accident.

George Lucas stitched together samurai films and westerns and old science fiction to create Star Wars. The inconsistencies became mythology. Our AI future builds the same way: brilliant innovations atop legacy code no one understands, digital gods sharing space with analog hermits, each contradiction somehow making sense.

Some choose to want nothing in a world that can fulfil any desire. They cultivate emptiness as a discipline. The rest of us struggle to honour our humanness but not so much we’re consumed by our craving. Attention becomes the only real currency: whether you can rest your gaze without algorithms capturing it, whether you can look away.

Some retreat entirely, building rituals around older technologies. Some merge until they’re mostly machine, gaining capability while losing something subtle. Most live between extremes, using tools we don’t understand for tasks we can’t quite explain.

Like Yoda in his swamp, the wise choose minimal engagement, maintaining power through what they don’t do. The Force, the AI itself, the infrastructure of intelligence mediating between thought and matter, serves those who learn its rhythms, consumes those who try to dominate it — much like nature.3

What makes us human isn’t intelligence. Machines have that. It isn’t strength. Machines have that too.

It’s this: we recognise each other’s consciousness. We feel. We know when someone else feels. This knowledge transcends every augmentation, every enhancement, every algorithmic mediation. In the future’s noise, we hunger for the friend who forgets our birthday but feels our sadness; we choose them over perfect AI companions who remember everything but don’t have a soul.

We will never prefer a robot to hold our hand on the deathbed if a compassionate human could be with us instead.

Our humanity lives in the irreducible fact of feeling, of being a living being among living beings, of preferring a human connection despite its inefficiency.

Back in the cafe, the barista’s gesture stays with me. Half programming, half superstition. Neither fully human nor fully machine. A improvisation that works until it doesn’t, until it does again.

The future won’t have a conclusion. Like Star Wars, it will just keep going, adding layers and contradictions, rewriting its own history, spawning endless variations.

The coffee tastes perfect. No one can explain why.

Our AI future is neither a triumph, not an apocalypse, but something wonderfully, terrifyingly incoherent. A space opera without a script where the only skill that matters is accepting the impossible with grace.

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I already wrote about some of them in a previous post, but there are a few more that keep nagging at me. Perhaps "miss" isn't even the right word. But we all seem to grab onto different parts of this thing, each convinced we understand it, when really we're all partially blind.

The patterns I keep noticing

When smart people talk about AI, I notice they tend to reduce it to something manageable. AI becomes chatbots. Or it becomes "just" pattern matching. They look at today's limitations and assume they’ll still be here tomorrow. They assume their experience with the technology is representative of everyone else's.

I've certainly been guilty of all of these myself.

We keep equating AI with chatbots

Often, when we talk about AI we equate it with chatbots: ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, Claude, DeepSeek. I was listening to a podcast on AI last night that never ventured beyond the chat interface (thanks for the recommendation Adriá!).

But this is like equating electricity with light bulbs. Sure, light bulbs don't work without electricity and they may be the most visible and transformative application of electricity. Yet it also powers everything from pacemakers to particle accelerators.

Likewise, AI as a general-purpose technology can power a chatbot, but it's also folding laundry (badly, but improving), discovering new antibiotics, creating photorealistic virtual worlds in real-time, and powering autonomous weapons systems.

Chatbots are easy to use and understand. But I wonder if it's making us miss the forest for a particularly charismatic tree.

The "just pattern matching" dismissal

A common argument that keeps surfacing is that AI is doing "just" pattern matching. It's "just" finding plausible outcomes given the immense data it was trained on. Because of this, the argument goes, AI systems aren't capable of "real" understanding or "real" creativity.

I find myself going back and forth on this one. There's something to the philosophical question of whether pattern matching can constitute understanding. (Though I sometimes wonder if my mind is doing much more than pattern matching itself.)

However, AI can act in the real world. It writes and executes code, and code powers much of our civilisation. When an AI diagnoses a medical condition correctly, or when it controls killer drones, the philosophical question of whether it "really" understands becomes... well, academic.

The swarm of drones example might be dramatic, but it illustrates something important. If AI-powered systems are making real-world decisions with real-world consequences, the question isn't whether they truly understand, it's whether they work. And increasingly, they do.

Looking at today instead of tomorrow

AI is often criticised for its limitations today. I do this myself, pointing out hallucinations, context window limitations, tendency to overcomplicate. But I keep forgetting that I'm looking at a technology in motion, not a finished product.

I remember this observation from : the length of tasks AI can autonomously complete is doubling every seven months. If this trend holds (and that's a big if), by 2027, which is closer than ChatGPT's launch, we could have AI handling eight-hour workdays with 50% success rate.

Three years ago, ChatGPT could barely write coherent paragraphs. Today, I'd argue it's a better software engineer than many people on the planet (including, most certainly, me). Whatever metric you look at — intelligence, autonomy, context size — we're on an exponential curve that shows no signs of flattening.

Yet I still catch myself thinking about AI's capabilities as if they're static. It's hard to think exponentially when our brains are wired for linear extrapolation.

The elephant problem

We all know the old parable about the blind experts and the elephant, each touching a different part and declaring they understand the whole. Of course, it’s a tired cliché, but with AI, it feels uncomfortably apt.

Some people use AI mostly for coding. Others for creative writing. Others for emotional support. Still others for data analysis or image generation. And each of us tends to think our use case represents the technology's essence.

I've been using AI primarily for coding and writing (and as a google replacement), but then I watched my Toby Stewart use it to make incredible ads and James McAulay launch advanced audio tools using AI. An 81 y.o. therapist praised ChatGPT as ‘eerily effective’ (I agree). And what Joshua Wohle is doing for personal productivity is on another level entirely.

No one has touched the entire elephant. I certainly haven't.

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A dependency we might not see coming

I listened to a lecture by Dr. John Vervaeke the other day that contained an insight I can't stop thinking about.

Vervaeke argues that a core function of consciousness is what he calls "relevance realisation": choosing what to focus on from the infinite field of possible attention. At any given moment, we face a computationally explosive choice of things we could pay attention to. Somehow, without conscious effort, we filter this down to what matters.

When AI is trained on human-generated data, it inherits our collective sense of what's relevant. But if it lacks the ability to perform relevance realisation independently, that is if it can only mirror the relevance judgments baked into its training data, what happens when AI runs out of human-generated content to train on?

This isn't just academic speculation. It suggests AI might be fundamentally dependent on human consciousness in ways we don't yet understand. Not in some mystical sense, but in a practical one: without our continuous input about what matters and what doesn't, AI might lose its grounding in reality.

I don't know if this is right. But it caught my attention. Watch the lecture above if you’re curious!

Where this leaves us

I don't have neat conclusions here. The more I think about AI, the less certain I become about what it is and where it's going.

What I do notice is that the people who seem most certain about AI, whether they're evangelists or skeptics, tend to be looking at just one facet of it. The chatbot users who think it's the future of everything. The armchair philosophers who dismiss it as mere pattern matching. The coders who see it as a fancy autocomplete.

Maybe the appropriate response isn't certainty but curiosity. Maybe we need to keep touching different parts of the elephant, comparing notes, staying humble about what we don't know.

As I prepare for Full Stack Founder AI Bootcamp (29-30 Sep, London), I'm looking forward to both sharing what I've learned about building with AI and learning what others have discovered.

What have you noticed that the rest of us might be missing?

Book your ticket using the discount code EVGENY100.

We were still wrapping things up at the end of the second day, when the participants started asking when the next AI bootcamp was going to be. A few people suggested creating a Whatsapp group that’s been quite active since. A few people stayed far past the end of the event, building new things together and forging new friendships.

So in two weeks time, it’s happening again.

What is it?

It’s an event for founders. Not for AI engineers debating fine details of the latest AI model, and not for people who haven’t had a chance to try ChatGPT yet.

It’s an event for those who sense the magnitude of the shift we’re going through thanks for AI and want to be part of it. It’s for founders who are itching to build AI-first startups, who are excited about the sense of possibility.

Here’s the talk I gave at the first event:

I will give a similar talk again, but even if you’ve read the post above, that’s not why you should come to the event.

The real reason is the shared conversation about what’s going on with dozens of your peers, making sense of these changes. This event is not about content — we have YouTube for that, although the content will be great. Full Stack Founder AI Bootcamp is about collective sense-making: seeing how other people are navigating the same questions that you have.

Take a session that Rachel Carrell, CEO of Koru Kids (and a subscriber), ran. It was one of my favourites. Rachel described in plain English how she’s integrating AI across her business and helping her team to shift to AI-first mindset. A founder from the trenches sharing her current experience — invaluable.

Or a session that Daniel van Binsbergen, CEO of DraftPilot (and a subscriber), ran. He’s building an AI-first product without investors with an extremely small team and is comfortably profitable. A donkeycorn in the making. Another founder sharing his real experience.

And there was more. That’s why the feedback was glowing, 4.8/5 avg rating:

"This experience was absolutely eye-opening and mind-blowing. I thought we were leveraging AI, but hearing from others completely expanded my understanding of what is possible. It gave me not just hope, but energy that we can achieve so much more as a small team."

Mica Vaipan, Founder, RunYourself

‘There’s so much noise in AI right now which can feel overwhelming as a Founder/CEO. This bootcamp cut through it. I learn best by doing, and Full Stack Founder was exactly that: real tools, live walkthroughs, and practical sessions that gave me clarity and confidence, especially as a non-technical founder. I left knowing what to use, what to ignore, and how to start implementing it across key areas of our business operations. Highly recommend it!’

Safia Qureshi, Founder, CLUBZER0

“A shout out to Full Stack Founder AI bootcamp! Just a couple weeks on and already the Humanity team decided to go all in with every Friday being an AI focus project day. Our developers are all on Cursor and we are speeding ahead with our Large Biological model. Thank you again for this great jumpstart and will report back soon! ”

Michael Geer, Founder, Humanity

Anyway, if you’re not convinced by this point, there’s little I can add.

And if you are, use the code EVGENY100 at the checkout.

WEBSITE — TICKETS

See you there!

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When the ground falls away, we reach for what does not fall. Whether it’s a prayer or a drink, our heart is intuitively looking for a connection to a deeper dimension of existence that our mind will never see, understand or maybe even acknowledge.

When my then wife and I decided to divorce back in 2019, I asked for an appointment with the divine in a way that made sense to me back then. It’s handy that ayahuasca is both a prayer and a drink.

This time… Wait, what do you mean ‘this time’?

Well, Egle and I decided to separate after six years together, having been engaged for the last two. Her note on instagram is so perfect that I wouldn’t have written a better one myself. The relationship transformed us both spiritually, but it wasn’t meant for romance, family or home, although we tried indeed.

Why am I writing about this to a thousand people on Substack, some of whom are close friends, some clients, and the rest strangers I haven’t ever met?

That’s a story of the inevitably messy but necessary task of navigating personal and professional boundaries.

As a coach, I work with a whole person. We may talk about CEO transitions but if the conversation takes us to heartbreak, we’ll go there together.

I also do my best to show up as a whole person. The skill here is to have my shit together and not dump my emotional stuff on the client. Not that I can hide it anyway, the client will feel it if I try.

And so I found myself picking up a phone and calling one client to tell them about my own breakup because otherwise it would have seeped into our coaching work.

Anyway, this time round, I booked a pilgrimage.

I would have never described myself as a person who goes on a pilgrimage. What is that anyway? Well, don’t ask me — I’ve never been.

What I do know is that one morning I woke up with perfect clarity on two points. First, I am going to India. Second, I am going there soon.

When the divine offers you an appointment, the only right answer is ‘thank you’.

(Once a CEO told me he stopped working with his coach — not me — because “he went to Peru and became too spiritual”. Advice to coaches: going to Peru is going to cost you clients.)

The appointment came earlier this year in the form of a direct connection to more love and gratitude than I had known possible — and this time without ayahuasca.

“Salmon swimming upstream,” I thought. No idea where exactly I’m swimming to, but I know in my bones it’s very important to get there.

I’ve been reflecting on all of this sitting Zen in the mornings. On the face of it, Zen looks the opposite of love: it’s got a strict and rigid form, it stresses discipline and effort. And bhakti yoga, the path of devotion, feels like total opposite: love is the path, even meditation is optional. Go chant instead!

And yet, these two paths lead to the same mountaintop. Through love and devotion we come to the direct realisation of oneness of all things. Through rigorous Zen practice, we directly see the empty nature of reality and find out that emptiness is not cold and indifferent, but deeply loving.

Love leading to wisdom. Wisdom leading to love. Love and wisdom becoming one.

So I’ve two intentions for my pilgrimage. First, chant Hanuman Chalisa with Krishna Das. And then, say the deepest ‘thank you’ I’m capable of at an ashram of Neem Karoli Baba.

Love and wisdom aren’t found in remote Indian ashrams alone, though. I received both from my psychoanalyst. He knows more about my personal life than all my friends combined. I found a part of me that wished he took care of me, eased my pain, told me what to do. This week, I named it:

— In our 1.5 years of working together, not once have I felt you nudging me to end my relationship.

— Would it have helped?

— No, it wouldn’t… And now I understand why.

I indeed understand now. Not fixing or advising was the most helpful thing he did for me.

You see, us coaches — even more than therapists — are trained not to fix, help or save our clients. We’re taught to be very, very careful with giving advice or even wishing, secretly, that our clients do this or that.

If we give advice, we must believe that the client needs it. That is, they are not capable of finding a way forward themselves. The clients will feel it; they will feel helpless thanks to their coach.

Intellectually, I knew all that from my coaching training, but actually feeling it in my psychoanalytic relationship gave me a far deeper appreciation of what love and attention without an agenda feel like. And how powerful it can be.

Feeling seen, accepted, understood and supported by my psychoanalyst without being ‘nudged’ or ‘fixed’ even when I was in pain, made all the difference.

You don’t pull a butterfly out of a caterpillar. You watch it emerge itself.

The only wisdom that’s genuinely ours is the one we earned ourselves. We can read all the books and be none the wiser if we haven’t earned the stripes.

We earn the wisdom of loving, caring and not fixing by bringing this attitude to our own heart, whatever heartache we might be experiencing.

Sometimes, we need to learn that some things don’t have a solution. They need to be witnessed and experienced on their own schedule. Grief and heartbreak are like this. The answer is ‘yes, thank you’, no matter how hard it is. And maybe one day the heartache stays but it stops being such a problem.

Deep in peruvian jungle, back in 2019, at the start of our first ayahuasca ceremony out of many, I anxiously wanted our shaman Spring Washam to tell me what to do if things felt “too much”.

“No matter what happens after you drink ayahuasca, never resist,” Spring said. “The only answer to every experience is ‘yes’.”

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Eventually, I started to get stuck in dreams. I would get into a frightening situation and wake up with my heart racing instead of finding a way out in the dream. Yet, it felt like progress.

In hindsight, what felt like never getting stuck was a skilful avoidance of the parts of psyche that I couldn't face, couldn't even come close to seeing them from the distance. We all have them. They're outside of our conscious mind but they can surface in the dreams, unless they're so deep and scary that we don't enter them even in the dreams.

That's why waking up with my heart racing felt like progress. I still couldn't enter them, but my psyche was getting ready for the showdown. Eventually, my dreams changed. I started to enter eerie, dead, shut-off spaces and then waking up from there, still being unable to go further for the time being. Take this dream: an abandoned building floating in some void, no chance of escape, with bored, angry people inside who've been stuck there for millennia without any hope. These were the parts of me I'd kept locked away.

Yet, even entering these spaces, trembling with fear, was progress. It was achieved not by setting goals or trying to get somewhere but by gently helping my psyche to look at what's scary. Bringing the light of awareness and attention to what's scary often works far better than trying to force some outcome or avoid the pain.

The Fantasy of Pain-Free Growth

What I learned in psychoanalysis about facing unconscious fears and letting go of fantasies continues to inform my coaching work.

The act of growing up is the process of shedding fantasies. They are countless; we all start with a big bag of them. One by one, we grieve them and let go.

One of the most persistent fantasies is that if only I find the right approach, the way forward will be pain-free.

The truth is that in some situations, the right way forward isn't going to be pain-free. It's not easy to let go of this fantasy, but we must do it.

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Leadership and the Courage to Feel

Many years ago, as CEO, I dreaded emotionally loaded conversations with my team. For example, letting someone go. Or making a quarter of the team redundant. Like, looking someone in the eye, knowing that their wife is pregnant and it's covid outside, and telling them their job doesn't exist.

These situations aren't meant to be easy. There are playbooks for how to do them better, yes, but there's no playbook for being pain-free in that moment. We can dissociate from pain — and that's how some of the worst leaders in the world emerge, those without empathy, causing lasting damage to their teams, the world and to themselves, ultimately, in ruthless pursuit of corporate goals at the cost of personal wholeness — but that's not the right way forward.

Like in dreams, when we feel the pain of such difficult situations, a racing heart may be a sign of progress. It may well mean that we're finding strength to get closer to how emotionally tense the situation is for everyone, and that's a step closer to actually being with it.

Being with it, bringing conscious awareness and attention to the difficulty and not running away from pain is what heals that pain, even if it doesn't feel like that in the moment. In the moment, it hurts. But the adult question is not how to avoid pain. The adult question is how to be with it. How to stand still with your hair on fire.

The Work of Presence

The true work of a leader is not to give orders but to choose what's important and hard, bring their awareness there and stand still if necessary. When our teams see this, they understand what's going on in their heart even if their minds are unable to articulate it. They feel that it's possible for someone else, and that makes it possible for them, too.

This principle extends beyond leadership into all forms of growth and support. As a coach, I rarely discuss dreams with my clients. That's psychoanalytic work. But much of what I do as a coach mirrors what I learned in analysis: helping my clients to choose where to focus their attention, and stand still there — while I'm there with them. All the good things — decisions, plans, goals — follow from there naturally if we are able to ask the right questions and look unflinchingly at the answers, holding the gaze with ourselves.

The journey from never getting stuck to finally entering those abandoned, floating buildings in my dreams taught me something counterintuitive: progress sometimes feels like regression. The racing heart, the moment of being stuck, the pain of difficult conversations — these aren't obstacles to growth. They're signs that we're finally approaching the parts of ourselves and our responsibilities that matter most.

Getting stuck, it turns out, is how we get free.

In conversation with ChatGPT about Leonard Cohen’s Thanks for the Dance — his final, posthumous album that reads like a summing-up of a long and complicated life — we spoke about legacy, paradox, and mystery. I was challenged to imagine my own song in Cohen’s style, something that would speak from my own heart.

I called it Both/or. ChatGPT offered to turn my reflections into a poem. To my surprise, it touched me:

I held the blade of either/or
It cut me into two
I swore my life to both/and peace
It split me through and through

I dropped the question in the well
It echoed back as mu
The silence was an ancient song
Too vast for me, too true

And what became of all my wars
My victories, my scars?
They vanished in the open sky
That isn’t mine, or ours

(Here is what it sounds like, performed by AI, of course.)

“I held the blade of either/or, it cut me into two…” Who among us hasn’t been cut in two? We can count ourselves lucky if it doesn’t push us into the depths of depression or worse, as it does for so many. Yet it’s the first blade life places in our hand.

Then comes the temptation of both/and peace. But that blade cuts just as sharply, if less obviously. Go searching for both/and peace in Gaza and tell me what you find.

Zen is famous for its don’t know mind approach. In theory it’s beautiful: openness, flexibility, freedom from dogma. But even mu can become another blade. When I want to scream “I fucking need to know!” and the answer is silence, “too vast for me, too true,” the blood flows again.

And yet, if we’re lucky, there comes a moment when we find ourselves standing in awe, under that open sky that belongs to no one, filled with gratitude simply for being alive.

Both/or. The paradox, the mystery, the very texture of life itself.

I believe we're going through a profound shift in how startups are built. Every single one of us learned how to build companies in the era of slow and expensive intelligence.

By this, I mean us, humans. We are intelligent, but we're slow to think, slow to hire, expensive, and can only work for a fraction of a day. Slow and expensive intelligence shaped everything we know about building companies: raising money, managing people, communication, ideation, finding product-market fit, scaling. Every aspect of our skillset has been shaped by this constraint.

For the rest of our lives, we'll be living and building businesses in the era of fast, cheap, and powerful intelligence. Intelligence that is smarter than us on many dimensions and certainly faster and cheaper. Therefore, the entire playbook of how to be an entrepreneur in this new world will be reinvented. We will learn to build AI-first startups, which I expect to be as different from today's tech companies like Tesla or Airbnb as those companies are from the giants of the previous era like BMW or Hilton.

The Tech-First Paradigm: Lessons from Netflix vs Blockbuster

Before we dive into AI, let's consider the classic case study of Netflix and Blockbuster. At the end of the nineties, both companies were renting DVDs. You want to watch a movie, they send it to you. Then you return your DVDs and get new ones back. Very exciting.

Netflix, however, realized that the future wasn't going to look like mailing DVDs. They correctly noticed that broadband speed and penetration were improving rapidly. They realized that if it kept improving, a decade or two later, people would be watching movies on handheld devices on the go instead of renting DVDs. So they started building a streaming business. Tech progress became a tailwind.

For Blockbuster, however, tech progress was a headwind. The better the broadband penetration, the fewer people wanted to watch DVDs. By the time Blockbuster realized their mistake and tried to launch streaming, it was too late. They went bankrupt. They were not a tech-first, but a tech-supported business: a business that used technology to optimize what they were doing without reinventing it.

By contrast, Netflix is a tech-first business. They used technology to reinvent the very business they were in. Their streaming business was enabled by and benefited from fast broadband. Their business got effortlessly better as the tech improved.

This is what it means to be tech-first. Not to use technology to optimize what you're doing, but to have it as a tailwind. This is why Airbnb is a tech-first company, but Hilton is not. Why Wikipedia is a tech-first company, but Encyclopaedia Britannica is not.

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What Makes a Company AI-First

Now, apply the same thinking to AI-first startups. The most important thing about AI-first startups is that they are enabled by and benefit from AI progress. AI progress is a tailwind and an enabler. The better the AI becomes, the better the product becomes. And it couldn't have existed without AI.

There are three other properties I consider important:

They use a large number of AI agents. We're living in the era of AI agents already. We can ask Deep Research to go do research for us. We can use AI agents to get a summary of updates from our competitors and email them to us every morning. We can build AI agents to follow complex workflows with multiple steps and branches to accomplish complex tasks. ChatGPT just launched Agent that combines a chatbot, Deep Research, and an Operator in one system.

What this means is that AI-first startups will have a very high ratio of agents to humans. Every human will learn how to build, configure, and manage AI agents and swarms of agents working together. There will be far, far more agents than humans. If this sounds far-fetched, consider that not too long ago it wasn't obvious why everyone would need a personal computer at home. Today, we're surrounded by tech everywhere. Just like people learned how to hire and manage other people, we'll learn how to hire and manage AI agents.1

They learn as they deliver value. Of course, every organization learns, but I'm certain AI will take this to a completely new level. Humans are very slow learners. We don't like learning, truth be told. We have to fight against our desire for comfort and stability. AI, on the other hand, can be a voracious learner. Everything that happens in the business, every customer interaction, every email conversation, every sale is an opportunity to learn and improve in an automated way. And this can compound quickly.

At this point, this is more of a vision than a reality. Today's AI systems don't learn from every conversation except by maybe saving some static memories about you. Their weights aren't updated on every run, like biological brains. However, this will surely change. I can't speculate on the exact technical mechanism, but I'm confident it will change.

They leverage human wisdom. I believe that human wisdom—not labor, cognitive or physical—will remain an important input to build successful AI-first startups. By wisdom, I mean the ability to know what matters and why. I'll come back to this point.

Why Smart People Miss the AI Revolution

All of this sounds completely obvious to me, and yet I regularly meet smart people who don't get it. I don't mean people who have principled and well-articulated objections—that's most welcome—but people who look at AI and conclude that "it's just another chatbot," or a fad, or yet another technology like cloud or crypto.

They aren't stupid, and yet they're making the mistake of dismissing AI. I came to believe that this is because they try to fit AI into their worldview instead of adapting their worldview based on their experience of using AI.

To see what I mean, consider the mistake I made about crypto. For years, I looked at crypto and thought: it's money, but it's too volatile; it's a ledger, but we already have ledgers; it's smart contracts, but they don't quite work; it's a store of value, but it doesn't have any intrinsic value. I tried to put it into my existing worldview, and of course it didn't fit, because it can't!

What people smarter than I did was to actually use crypto day to day, which helped them realize that crypto is neither money, nor a store of value, nor a ledger, nor a smart contract, but all of this together in a unique way.

Even software developers, who understand and use AI better than most, are often in denial about its implications. The famous quote from Upton Sinclair is apt: "It's difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it." Software development is both accelerated and threatened by AI, but many software developers are trapped in thinking along the lines of "I'm a smart and experienced software engineer who knows that delivering great software is about far more than just writing code, which is why I deserve a six-digit salary."

The problem is that the salary of such a software developer literally depends on not understanding the predicament they're in. If they were to actually understand it, they would be learning how to build software in an AI-first way like their hair is on fire! But there's not enough market demand for that yet, so their six-digit salary depends on them sticking to their current job at some bank that doesn't allow AI anywhere near the codebase.

Zero-Based Thinking: Building from Scratch

For entrepreneurs and developers alike, the right question to ask is not how to do what you're already doing more efficiently. The first question must start with zero-based thinking: what would my business look like today if it were built from scratch with AI at its core? And only then think about efficiency.

If Blockbuster had asked this question 25 years ago, we could all be watching Blockbuster on our iPads instead of Netflix. Instead, they used technology to improve the efficiency of ordering DVDs. We must apply zero-based thinking to build products and companies that will have a chance to survive and thrive in the next decade.

It doesn't mean starting a new business. Netflix didn't start as a streaming company, but then it became a tech-first company. Replit didn't start as an AI-first company a decade ago, but today they are an AI-first company. It means approaching things in an AI-first way.

I often think about AI as a dark thin line on the horizon. I want you to visualize what a tsunami looks like in real life. At first, it looks like nothing. There's a thin dark line far away, people are filming it and discussing it. Twenty seconds in, some people are starting to get worried. Thirty seconds in, the impact comes. That's what we're living through: exponential change. It looks like nothing, then still nothing, and then it's the impact.

So be careful when people tell you that it's just a thin dark line on the horizon, it's nothing big. When it becomes big, it'll be too late to prepare.

Finding AI Disruption Opportunities

How do you actually adapt your worldview? You don't just decide to do it. You must use AI tools on a daily basis to understand what they're good at, what they're bad at, what tools to use when.

To give you an example of a small mindset shift, let me tell you about how ChatGPT helped me with recruitment. Some time ago, I needed a freelancer with a particular skillset to start the following day. I wasted hours on Sales Navigator and Upwork before realizing I could ask ChatGPT Deep Research to find me the right person, who then started the next day. I wouldn't even have thought about using ChatGPT for recruitment if I hadn't been using it extensively for many other tasks.

Let me give you another example of how to use Deep Research in non-obvious ways. I used it to identify AI disruption opportunities by formulating a disruption thesis, defining the shape of the solution, and asking it to find specific examples.

My thesis was that small companies in the UK with strong product-market fit and human-intensive value creation are particularly vulnerable to AI. Why come up with new ideas if you can take an existing PMF and rebuild the product in an AI-first way, undercutting the incumbents on price? Small companies are easier targets than big companies: they're less innovative and have simpler products, but may have good revenues that would be attractive for a bootstrapped small team.

Deep Research found me many specific companies, including one that turns about £10m a year doing reference checks for big companies. They verify CVs by calling every previous school or employer and asking to confirm details. Can't AI do it? Voice generation is already scary good. Of their £10m in revenues, probably £8M go to people doing phone calls. What if the price can be slashed by 70% and the cost by 90%, delivering a couple million quid in free cash flow a year to a pair of bootstrapped founders?

My point is that to understand what AI is good at, we must use it a lot. We must use it daily to form a mental model of what's possible.

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The Rise of Donkeycorns

This brings me to donkeycorns. Unicorns are so 2010 that I'm not interested anymore. Instead, I'm fascinated by the concept of donkeycorns, which grind like a donkey but party like a unicorn. They are small businesses that have low revenues but high profits, very small teams, and no external investment. Imagine two people doing a £2M ARR business at 90% margin.

Historically, building donkeycorns was very hard, so they are rare. But AI changes the equation. Before, we raised money to hire engineers to get to product-market fit and cash flows, hoping to sell the business for enough money to make the diluted stake worth it.

But if AI-first building tools allow founders to go from idea to prototype in days, why raise money? If the PMF can be proven quickly, we can get to revenue fast. And if our costs are low because we don't need expensive engineers, that's the path to bootstrapping the entire thing.

There's nothing wrong with building unicorns, but this is not the only playbook anymore. Consider what Daniel built at DraftPilot, helping lawyers redline contracts. They’ve got an incredibly lean team and are already profitable with an impressive ARR without raising any VC because they built the product themselves in little time!

And the crazy thing is that Daniel, or any of us, can build several AI-first products like this to learn fast and iterate quickly. Venture capital will have its place, but it'll focus on truly venture-scale ideas that truly require venture funding. But it's not the only playbook in town anymore.

Philosophy for the AI Era: Beyond Intelligence

Where is our edge as human beings in the era of cheap and fast intelligence? Let's digress into philosophy for a bit.

Your happiness in the AI era will be defined by how you experience and think about yourself, that is, by your philosophical perspective. Until recent advances in AI, most people could afford not to think about this. Not anymore.

What do you think defines you as a human? Today, most people take it for granted that our cognitive and communicative abilities define us as humans. We tend to see our very civilization as evidence of the value and power of intelligence and language. We tend to consider ourselves special or valuable because we have these skills. Furthermore, we derive a sense of safety from them: "I'm smart and articulate, so I'll figure it out."

Now, this is a philosophical position, whether you think about it in these terms or not. You assume that one of your aspects or skills is essential to who you are as a human being. What happens if we think about ourselves as defined by our intelligence if we live in a world where intelligent systems are plentiful and much smarter than us?

Let me illustrate by analogy. Imagine living in the pre-industrial world, where nearly everyone does physical labor because it's needed for everything, from fetching water to growing food to building a house. Imagine you're living well because you have a strong and healthy body. Maybe you're a hunter. You make good money. You're well-known and respected for your craft. You probably think of your ability to track game, read the wilderness, and make precise shots as essential to your identity.

What happens to your sense of self if suddenly someone invents machines that can do the hunting? Imagine seeing thermal imaging scopes, GPS tracking devices, automated traps, and drone scouts being invented all at once.

If you've invested your identity in your ability to hunt with skill and instinct, you'll have two options. You can either get very depressed because your sense of the world has been uprooted, or you can adapt to the new reality by, say, realizing that you can use your mind instead of your wilderness instincts.

So, instead of making a living by tracking and shooting game yourself, you now run a business that operates or sells thermal scopes and automated hunting systems. You stop thinking about yourself and your worth in terms of how keen your senses are and instead start thinking in terms of how smart you are. After all, GPS devices and thermal cameras can't think for themselves, right?

This evolutionary response is obvious because we're so used to thinking about ourselves as intelligent and articulate. So, let's apply the same logic to living in a world where we aren't the most intelligent or articulate anymore.

Like it or not, competing with AI in intelligence is like competing with a forklift in weightlifting, only worse, because forklifts don't get stronger all the time, as AI does.

So what happens to the sense of identity of a person who thinks about themselves primarily as smart and intelligent, like most of us do, when AI inevitably starts doing cognitive work better, faster, and cheaper than us? It will most likely feel scary and disorienting, as if the rug were pulled from under our feet, a big shock to our entire sense of the world.

However, it doesn't have to be this way. Our intelligence does not define us any more than our physical strength does. Our ability to think is not central to what makes us human. It is simply one of the many things we are capable of. It is an understandable but unfortunate fact that so many of us see intelligence as central to who we are without noticing it.

So what makes us human, then?

If you ask this question to a Zen master, they might slap you across the face as the answer. The point wouldn't be to insult you but to make you feel the answer rather than think about it. The answer lies in the difference between slapping you across the face and slapping your laptop across the screen. The computer wouldn't feel anything.

But there's more depth to it. There's a difference between being slapped by someone else and accidentally bumping your forehead into a door. When someone slaps you across the face, even if they are a Zen master, not only do you feel something, but you feel it in the context of a relationship with another living being.

I argue that these two aspects of our existence are essential to us as human beings: the ability to experience life and feel connected to or affected by other people. Technology will make it easier and cheaper to process what can be digitized and processed digitally. But what's truly essential to us—feeling and connecting to others—cannot be digitized.

One day, we may look back and consider our obsession with intelligence as something deeply inherent to humans in the same way humans used to relate to physical prowess. There's nothing wrong with running marathons, but no one does it to get from A to B faster. We have cars for that.

Yes, we'll probably lose our crown as the most intelligent creatures. Still, I bet that it will give us more opportunities to embrace being human, just like giving up most of the physical labor allowed us, as a civilization, to exercise our intelligence and wisdom.

Wisdom, defined here as knowing what matters and why, is born not from intellectual knowledge but from lived experience, from doing things together with other human beings and feeling the joys and sorrows inherent in the process. Wisdom, that is, knowing what matters and why, will remain within the human domain. Computers can be infinitely smart, but I'm yet to see any evidence any of them can be wise.

Agency Trumps Intelligence

But I think another critical human factor is agency. Our ability to set goals, be proactive, self-reliant, and adaptive will be the edge over AI.

In the era of slow and expensive intelligence, we used to outsource our agency to others by getting jobs. Someone else could deal with uncertainty, and we could have a comfortable job at a big company using our smart brain to solve complex problems. I think this model is now very fragile.

We used to think that entrepreneurship is risky and jobs are safe. If my startup fails, I'll go get a job, right? Entrepreneurship used to be the exception and jobs used to be the norm. Soon, it will be the reverse. It doesn't mean that everyone will literally register a company on Companies House, but people in jobs will act like entrepreneurs because the company won't be able to tell them what to do beyond offering high-level context and basic infrastructure. People will still have jobs on paper, but they will be acting like entrepreneurs: learning, adapting, and constantly evolving.

Most people think about the impact of the Industrial Revolution when they try to understand the impact of AI on jobs. But for me, a more recent and relevant example is the fall of the Soviet Union, which I remember as a child.

When the planned economy collapsed, many jobs disappeared overnight. Skills that used to guarantee a solid salary became useless in the market economy. The transition from planned economy to market forces was brutal for many people. Yet, it is those with entrepreneurial skills, with agency, with capacity to adapt and learn, who stood a better chance at navigating that transition. It took about 10 years for Russia to adapt to the new reality.

After decades of state-guaranteed employment, people suddenly discovered their skills were obsolete overnight. Jobs once seen as safe, even essential, evaporated as the planned economy imploded. Entrepreneurship, virtually nonexistent under Soviet rule, became a lifeline. Individuals pivoted careers rapidly—from chemistry teachers to market sellers, taxi drivers, restaurant owners, even banana importers from Ecuador. This flexibility was needed for survival.

I think something similar will happen in the coming years thanks to AI. We will still need our intelligence, but our wisdom and agency will matter even more than before. Better be fast and imperfect than perfect and late.

The Path Forward

So here is what I would like you to remember. Whatever you build, make sure it's AI-first: it benefits from and is enabled by AI progress. Use AI daily to adapt your worldview and see what's possible. Forget VCs unless you truly need them. Think about donkeycorns instead! They're less risky and more exciting. And finally, don't forget that wisdom and agency are some of the things that make us human and give us an edge against AI.

The future belongs not to those who can think the fastest or process the most information, but to those who know what matters, can adapt quickly, and maintain their humanity in an increasingly automated world. The AI revolution is already here.

PS: If you’re in for an overview of where the world is likely going, check out this video:

I’m not here to change anyone’s mind.

I’m here to love everybody and tell the truth.

The truth is that we, as a society, as a civilisation, are doing this to each other, to our children.

The truth is that we are quite good at separating who will get to choose their favourite ice cream today and who will starve to death. The truth is that we think it’s normal.

The truth is that we’re willing to tolerate genocide and ethnic cleansing streamed live on social media. We means you, I and most people you and I personally know. The truth is that we’re trying to pretend we’ll be able to ignore it and forget it.

The truth is that we’re pretending it’s somehow not our problem because this is done with someone else’s hands.

The truth is that we, as western society that’s implicitly and explicitly allowing this to happen, are deranged. We’re as deranged as those fine guys that Jesus had in mind when He said, ‘Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing.’

The truth is that we don’t know what we’re doing. We truly don’t.

The truth is that I don’t know what I can do to help, let alone stop it. Every morning in my zen dojo, we chant a Bodhisattva vow in Japanese at the end of the meditation session. The vow is to save all beings from suffering, even though they are innumerable and the suffering is endless. An impossible task.

How?

By keeping our hearts open, staying forever brokenhearted without any hope, and doing what we can where we can. I don’t need to give you ideas: your heart knows what to do if only you’re willing to keep it open.

Whatever the way forward, it has to come from a place of love. “Even for Netanyahu?” — asked a friend of mine the other day. Yes, no exceptions.

Making exceptions about who’s worthy of love is how we’ve got into this mess in the first place. I don’t mean just Gaza, but the climate crisis, rampant inequality, racism, destroyed biosphere, every single war, animal suffering on a truly industrial scale… the whole bloody mess.

But when you feel love, real love, you realise that it can’t possibly discriminate at all, no more than gravity can discriminate between objects. Love doesn’t choose or wait until someone is worthy of it. It’s beyond all of that; beyond the ideas of right and wrong, beyond you and me. And if you don’t know what I’m talking about, please trust me and take me literally.

So whatever the way forward, whatever you choose to do in your creative, imaginative way as you allow your heart to stay open and tender in face of unbearable pain, do it from a place of love for everybody: starving children in Gaza, hostages of Hamas, killed IDF soldiers and their families and even Netanyahu.

Hatred is never appeased by hatred in this world. By non-hatred alone is hatred appeased. This is a law eternal.

Dhammapada